Check out Monitor This, a fabulous service that builds an importable OPML file of RSS feeds for any search you input - in 22 search engines at once! It looks great. I've just subscribed to some searches this way and we'll see how it goes.

I was told about this by Lisa Williams, with whom I began an interview this morning. (I love it when people are down for long IM interviews!) It's a real good interview, too. Lisa is awesome. I love her approach to research - and not just because it reminds me of my own but with different tools. We haven't really even begun to talk about OPML either - and that's the reason I asked her for an interview.

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search, RSS, OPML,

This is interesting, you've read about the bizarre combo of Google refusing to give up US search documentation on one hand but agreeing to censor what Chinese users can see at the behest of the Chinese government on the the other hand. Check out what Google China users see when they do an image search for Tienanmen. That's a popular page to link to in the blogsphere today.

Witness the shocking difference between that and, for example, a US Google user's image search results for Christopher Columbus. Comparably benign, are they not?

So while it would be no small technological achievement for Google to successfully hide the images that the rest of the world associates with Tiananmen from the Chinese people themselves, I would contend that they still have a ways to go before they can rival the scale of cultural "information organization"/obfuscation that goes on all the time in the United States.

Like what? US history aside even, how about the following:

• "Current estimates are that $500 billion to $1 trillion in illegal funds are laundered through banks worldwide each year, with about half going through U.S. financial institutions." US Senator Carl Levin
• "Trafficking of women and children for the sex industry and for labor is prevalent in all regions of the United States. An estimated 45,000 to 50,000 women and children are trafficked annually to the United States..." From Cia.gov
• "The U.S. has the largest per capita prison and jail population in the Western industrialized world, with approximately 2 million inmates...As Americans continue to recoil at the sight of photographs and videotapes showing handcuffed prisoners piled naked on top of one another, being bitten by dogs, being sexually exploited and subjected to other forms of debasing abuse at the Abu-Ghraib prison in Iraq, human rights advocates say similar constitutional violations occur on a regular basis in United States prisons." via Common Dreams.

We may be able to find these things on the internet in the US (the fact that they are true is bad enough) but how often do we discuss or consider them? Isn't the effect similar at least?
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From Will Richardson's blog comes this anecdote from a trip he just took to meet with 100 tech coordinators from Pinellas County Florida schools. He found that a greater number than would have been the case in the past knew what blogs, podcasts and wikis were. Only about 10 knew what RSS was.

Richardson concludes the wrap up with this:

As we were discussing the concept of readers as editors, I showed them the white supremacist created Martin Luther King site . Well, actually, I showed a picture of it since it was being blocked at the time, and after pointing out the obvious racist tenor of the site, I asked how many could go and find out who owned that domain, who created and updated it.

There was a deafening silence.

Not. One. Person.

Mercy.

Well, I'm guessing that some readers here could find the following info useful: Whenever you want more info about any web page, there's one place I recommend going. Who owns the domain name? What has the page looked like in the past and throughout it's life? How much traffic does it get? Who is linking to it? How can I know when it changes in the future? These are just a few of the questions you can find answers to at the awesome meta tool URLInfo by FaganFinder. I often use particular tools from this set individually, but there's really no reason to know more than this one page: faganfinder.com/urlinfo. Make sure you check out the "cache" tab, item "internet archive" when you're there.

The direct answer to Richardson's question is that you look up the WhoIs info to learn who owns the domain. But why stop there? Thought that might come in handy.

If there is more specific info than WhoIs on who specifically updates a page, somebody let me know - it's news to me.

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I've had the honor over the last few days to do an email interview with Mark Cuban for Net Squared. Turns out he's a reader of this blog - cool! We talked about:

• the importance of caution on the part of non-profit groups in using Web 2.0 tools
• the value that blogging can bring to an organizaiton
• the future of blog search in general, and Cuban's IceRocket.com in particular.

I hope you'll check out the interview and the rest of the work being done at Net Squared.

Link: Thoughts on Adoption of New Web Tools: An Interview with Mark Cuban

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Technorati Profile

In the spirit of exploration and a couple of other things, I'm hereby claiming this blog in technorati. Unfortunately, the javascript means of doing so doesn't appear to work. Has that been anyone else's experience?

While you too may want to claim your blog inside Technorati, don't let Technorati claim you or too much of your mental space. Other very good blog and tag search engines include:

• TagCentral
• IceRocket
• BlogPulse
• Google Blogsearch

I know that Technorati has lots of features that those don't, but I just don't want other good options to be forgotten. There are many more, of course. Del.icio.us tag "Blog_search" has some good items.

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Online researcher Gary Price was gracious enough to do a long IM interview with me last week and I've posted it over at the Net Squared blog. Price is the editor of ResourceShelf, a news wire of databases and research resources, and the News Editor at Search Engine Watch. Lots of good info shared.

We focused on the following topics:

• Libraries and Google
• General Web Search Beyond Google
• RSS and Email
• Web Site Watcher, ResourceShelf and Research Methods
• Consulting, Speaking and Inspiring New Learning
• Building Organizational Support for New Web Tools
• Some of Gary’s Favorite Book Search Engines

I hope you'll check it out and look around the rest of the Net Squared site and conference info while you're there. Interview with Gary Price

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Gary_Price, ResourceShelf, research, RSS, Google, interviews, Web2.0, libraries

Full text search doesn't always bring back the most relevant results available; just because a word in used on a page doesn't mean that's really what the page is about. Hence the practice of tagging texts with subject level metadata. There are many ways you can search for blog posts and other items that have been given a certain tag. The best known is via a Technorati Tag Search. Perhaps because this is the most well known option, people often refer to the tags at the end of their posts as Technorati Tags. On one level they may be that, but on another important level that is inaccurate.

The secret of these searchable tags is the rel="tag" part of the code. The rest of the code in a blog tag is just a link to a Technorati tag search for the tag you are applying to your post. You don't have to link to Technorati in order for your post to appear in a Technorati Tag Search! If you are pinging Technorati (should be automatic, I use Feedburner) and if your site is easily index-able - then Technorati is going to find anything you link with rel="tag" in it and it should include that in its tag search results. Except Technorati indexing is kinda wack - as in it isn't 99% reliable.

Nonetheless, it is good to tag your blog posts. People will find your posts and site that way. Here are two bookmarklets below that you can drag and drop onto your browser's toolbar to create tag code for your posts. The first is for traditional "Technorati Tags" and will create links to Technorati Tag searches for your tags. The second bookmarklet may as well be called a "Tag Central Tag Creator" as it will create links to a search for your tag in Tag Central. Both will get your tags indexed in Technorati!

The pros and cons of using Tag Central? Pros: it pulls in results from a greater number of tag supporting platforms, including Upcoming.org, a social calendering service wherein events get tagged. Tag Central brings in all of the same sources as a Technorati Tag Search - and more. Tag Central also makes the RSS feeds for your tag in each platform very easy to subscribe to. The down sides? Tag Central is slow and ugly. But it's still the best way to search the tagspace.

If the use of these bookmarklets is unclear to you, my friend Beth Kanter has made a video screencast about how they work.

These bookmarklets could easily be tweaked to link to any tag search for your tags: Icerocket, Eventful.com, Blinklist - anything! And no matter who your tags link to, Technorati should index them just because there's a rel="tag" in the link code.

If you want to tweak these bookmarklets, just drag them into a text editor, fiddle away, then put in a blog post or web site and they will be draggable just like these ones.

Here they are!

Update: see also this page for a more refined TagCentral bookmarklet.
TechnoratiTags

TagCentralTags

And for this post...
TagCentral Tags: tagging, bookmarklets, Technorati, TagCentral, search, web2.0, blogging

A few weeks ago for a client I was looking at a large number of web sites for non-profit groups around Oregon and Washington and noticed that not only were they rarely updated and seldom offered RSS feeds, their link structure was utterly unusable. At the very least I wanted to scrape RSS feeds from their sites (using Feedfire.com) so that I could subscribe to updates. Unfortunately, even this was difficult as most of their links were tied to text like dates of events (as opposed to event titled) or to text that had no meaning out of the site's immediate context (like "for more info click here). I was thinking about that experience this morning when I wrote an article for RSSApplied titled Blogging and RSS Foster Better Link Structure, Search Engine Optimization. It was originally written with a business context in mind, but I think that the basic ideas here could be helpful talking points in explaining why blogging and RSS are important in any context.

All too often, web sites contain links with no title but the word "here." As in, for more information click here. Though this might make sense to the writer when the web site in question is a series of static, interlocking pages and documents that are navigated simply by taking one step at a time - those days are in fact gone.

Web sites today change frequently, and when they don't many people become frustrated. Blogging and RSS are the perfect cure for this, as blogging makes changing a web site easy and RSS makes subscription to future changes on a site require almost no investment of time or energy.

Advantages of using blogging and RSS for your web site include:

• Resources of any type entered as a blog post are created with a descriptive title as the post's link. This structure lends to maximimum search engine visibility as the text inside links is more heavily weighted when a web page is indexed by search engines. If the first text on your page that is found by search engines is the linked word "here", you have lost a major opportunity for yourself and others to be able to find that item high in any search results. A descriptive blog post title and link, in conjunction with the well designed metadata called "tags", will make any item easier to find.
• RSS subscribers will receive your headline links via their subscriptions. A non-descriptive link is unlikely to be clicked through.
• A well designed blogging and RSS system will automatically "ping" relevant search engines, RSS feel delivery systems and other services of interest. To ping these services is to send them a message that changes have been made to your site and they should come and index the site anew. Content frequently updated and pinged for will appear much higher in search engine results than static content submitted to search engines just once.

All of these technologies working together (blogging, RSS, pinging, etc.) will help make your site's content much more visible to the outside public and for your own later retrieval - thus saving time when you need to find something on your own site for later reuse.

Technorati Tags: blogging, RSS, SEO, websites, links, nptech

Did you know that eBay handles as many searches each month as Google does? It's a strange world, isn't it? I wonder how many of those searches are performed manually by humans. A much higher percentage at Google, I'd guess.

Related and also from John Battelle's blog, are the following images.

I'll never forget the first person who told me about Google. It was discussed as if it were some kind of underground secret. I still have someone ask me every once in awhile if I know about Google!

I just discovered Podzinger via Emily Chang's eHub, itself a site you should make sure to check out if you haven't. I was excited to look at a new podcast search engine, as the you never can have too many good options.

The things I look for in a podcast search engine are these:

• RSS feeds for my search queries - this is by far most important to me.
• Can I listen to excerpts where my search terms are used?
• How big is the engine's index, or is it able to find shows about my topics of interest?
• Is it easy to submit a podcast for indexing?
• Is it easy to download the podcasts from the search results page?
• Are there any other features that I didn't expect?

So what are our options and how do they compare?

Podzinger
RSS feeds are included, this is what interested my in this service. According to the search results page though, "RealPlayer and IE 5.0 or higher are required for audio playback." You've got to be kidding. That means I won't be listening to excerpts. At least the occurence of my search terms is time stamped. Podzinger has indexed is 20137 podcasts, seems to be growing and finds good results in my areas of interest (non-profit, social justice, ecology, etc.) It is very easy to submit a podcast to be indexed. Unexpected features? Check out the Podzinger registration page, where you can find code to insert a search for your own podcast into your web site. Nice, but does it rely on RealPlayer as well?

Conclusion: I'll be subscribing to feeds from Podzinger and might consider recommending it to people who want to add a search function to their own podcast's web page. I won't be visiting the Podzinger site itself very often as I find its requirements to listen to excerpts frustrating.

Yahoo Podcast Search
Feeds? Nope, and that's surprising given how well RSS is embraced generally at Yahoo. Can I listen to excerpts? Nope. Listening is through a proprietary Yahoo podcast listener thing that I don't really trust, but worse than that - you have to log in to a Yahoo account in order to download the files! Once I do that even, I'm taken straight through to loading the audio file on my browser! I want to click a button and chose to download the file onto my hard drive, thank you. I don't see how many files are indexed, though I imagine lots of people have figured out how to submit to this service. I am so upset by how dumbed-down and locked up this interface is that I don't even want to look at Yahoo podcast search anymore! As for interesting features, the searches do separate podcast series that are described using your search terms vs. episodes in which your search terms are said. Additionally, there are listener reviews, tagging, etc. Yahoo has so much money and status that I'm sure you can probably find lots of interesting things with it, but the difficulty in downloading, the lack of an RSS feed and the requirement that I login with a Yahoo ID all make me so angry that I will probably never recomend this search engine to anyone.

Blinkx.com
I love Blinkx. They were the fist service I found that offered an RSS feed for searches, and their customer service has been incredibly helpful and engaged with problems I've had with them! I love them! Unfortunately, there are problems here too. Search results only deliver the episode title and not the source show or podcast series name. That's strange. You can't listen to excerpts around your search terms, that too is a real shame. But it is very easy to download the files in your search terms. I can't tell how many podcasts they index, but it is very easy to submit podcasts for indexing. Innovative features include a slider to prioritize date or relevance in the order your search results appear in. I like Blinkx best of all of these options, though I wish some of the feature omissions weren't an issue.

Podscope
I rarely use this service because there is no RSS feed for my searches! Executives from the company said in an interview I listened to that they would be supporting RSS soon...and that was months and months ago. Whoa, I take it back! Upon visiting the site again I see that they have added RSS. Yay! This is a new contender for my absolute favorite. The search results are displayed beautifully. You can easily listen to excerpts based on your search terms, it's easy to download the files, there are great links to the podcast's home page, the search-discovered episode's permalink and the podcasts RSS feed. It is easy to submit a podcast for indexing and they too now offer a search box for your show's site. Wow! This is great, go check it out and click on some Adsense.

Conclusion: I think that Podscope may be my new favorite. I am so excited to see the changes they've made.

Feedster Podcast Search
I love Feedster. They offer customer service almost 24-7 via IM! And it was really helpful customer service when I contacted them. They do, of course, offer feeds for searches. You cannot listen to excerpts around your search terms, you can select either series descriptions or episodes to search inside. Download is easy and you can chose either date or relevance as priority for display of your search results. I can't tell how hard it is to submit or how big the index is. The front page says "Currently Indexing feeds from different podcasts." Well isn't that nice?

Conclusion amongst conclusions: When I have multi-media research needs for myself or a client, I am most likely to subscribe to feeds for my queries from Blinkx, Feedster and now Podscope and Podzinger. If I am doing a one time search for audio content, I am going to search inside Podscope so that I can listen to excerpts around my search terms. If I'm looking for shows about a certain subject, as opposed to particular episodes that mention my search term...I might begrudgingly use Yahoo.

Technorati Tags: podcasts, search, podcast, audio, RSS, Yahoo, Blinkx, Podscope, Feedster, Podzinger